Page 20 of Kiss Me at Christmas
“I certainly wasn’t the first person to break in—”
Ms. Winter removed her gloves and held up one gnarled hand for silence, gold rings heavy with diamond clusters and precious stones wedged over swollen knuckles, arthritic fingers bent at painful angles.
“By all means furnish me with the names of your co-conspirators, Ms. Smith. I would be delighted to include them in the punishments.” She gave a slow blink that felt like a challenge, and Harriet knew she’d been snookered. Ms. Winter cocked her head ever so slightly to the side. “No?” she asked. “Nobody you’d like to implicate?”
Harriet remained quiet. Seething. Her phone pinged loudly in her bag once, then again, then five more times in quick succession.
“Sorry,” she muttered, pulling it out of her bag. She glanced at the screen and saw several texts from Cornell and a voice note from Ali. Her stomach squeezed. “I’m sorry,” she said, holding the phone to her ear. “I just need to address these to make sure there’s not an emergency.”
Ali’s message was about lunch and a glance at Cornell’s texts informed her they were simply more requests for her to do his work. Reluctantly, she turned her phone to silent and put it in her bag.
“Are we interrupting your social life?” Evaline’s voice was snide.
“No, it’s work. I’ll deal with it later.”
Evaline regarded her coldly. “My solicitor has been kind enough to draw up a contract. You are welcome to have it looked over by your own counsel, but I can assureyou that it is completely legal.” She held her hand out to James, and he passed her a set of documents fastened with a paper clip. “In lieu of pressing charges, this contract will be signed by you and me and witnessed by Mr. Knight and my chauffeur.”
“Is all of this really necessary?” Harriet asked.
“What assurances do I have that you will keep your side of the agreement if I don’t have it in writing?”
“You have my word.” Harriet gritted her teeth.
“The word of a woman who trespasses? I don’t think so, Ms. Smith. Mr. Knight, would you be so kind…” She gestured to the side of Harriet’s seat.
James leaned over and slid a small tabletop up from inside the door and flipped it down across Harriet’s lap. She could smell his aftershave, neroli oil and patchouli, and beneath that his shampoo, notes of fresh mint and eucalyptus so clean and crisp she wanted to breathe him in like a blue-sky morning. The scent transported her to his bed, his head between her thighs, her hands gripping fistfuls of his crisp white sheets. She swallowed and tried to steady her racing heart, pushing the thoughts from her mind. As he locked the table flat with a click, James looked briefly up at her with the intensity of a person trying to convey something of importance. She looked away, pointedly. When he sat back in his own seat, the dispassionate glaze of professionalism had returned.
Evaline slid the contract onto Harriet’s table and snapped her fingers. The sound was weak, soft, unlike the resolve of this formidable woman. But James set to as though she’d cracked a starter pistol; he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a pen, which he placed in Ms. Winter’s wrinkled palm, and she placed it on top of the contract.
Harriet’s hand hovered over the pen. If she was goingto do it, she had to do it now, before she signed the paperwork.
“I will sign. But before I do, I have a proposal that I’d like to put to you.” She wished her voice sounded less halting, but this formidable woman made her feel deeply nervous, and with James there watching too, it was very much like being stuck in one of those dreams where she turned up to work inexplicably naked.
Evaline’s stare was withering.
“Do you feel as though you are in a position to be making proposals?” she asked.
Before this meeting, Harriet had been pep-talking herself with things likeFind a common ground. Appeal to her community spirit. She’s a person, you’re a person, you’re both just people.Now, however, she realized the futility of her reasoning; at this point she wasn’t even sure Evaline Winter was human. Her eyes darted to James, who had suddenly become engrossed in a spreadsheet. He didn’t look up. Okay. She could do this. It was now or never.
She cleared her throat.
“I’m sure you are aware of how little there is for young people to do in the town. The cinema has closed down, the bowling alley is now a charity shop warehouse, and even if they were still open, a lot of the kids in the town couldn’t afford to use them. Your theater is sitting empty. What if it could become a community space, a place where the young people of Little Beck Foss could meet, away from negative influences? Supervised, of course. I’m not talking about a free-for-all. We could utilize the layout for drama, singing, a theater group; we could have book clubs and table tennis, art classes…” She was rambling, her ideas spilling out and falling over one another, but she dared not take a breath and risk being cut off.“Maybe the school would pay you a rent to allow students to perform their creative work…”
“And I would allow all this why, exactly?” asked Ms. Winter, her tone a knife edge.
Was her idea not self-explanatory? James had begun writing furiously in his leather-bound notebook, the scratch of his pen loud in the frosty silence.
“Because it would help people. Young people in your community. And it wouldn’t cost you anything. I’m already going to be cleaning the place up anyway, it may as well be used—”
“Perhaps I don’t want my family’s theater to be used as a den for miscreants, Ms. Smith.”
Harriet bristled. “It wouldn’t be a ‘den,’ and the kids I’m talking about are not ‘miscreants.’ And I’m sure your father would have preferred the theater to be used for the creative arts than left crumbling like a forgotten mausoleum.”
Ms. Winter’s green eyes flashed, like a snake readying itself to strike.
“Sign the contract, Ms. Smith.”
Harriet lost her cool. “But it’s empty! It’s just sitting there like a big unloved blot on the high street!” Evaline remained unmoved, so she tried appealing to her ego. “With a little TLC, your theater could be a vital resource for the whole town. You could help change the fortunes of young lives and secure a legacy as a beloved philanthropist. A double whammy, with very little effort on your part.”
